Page 48 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

Chapter 3. Perspective of the teachers - practicality
Design principles for adaptive feedback and improvement activities in the form of building blocks
To make the regular lessons outlined above more adaptive, students and teachers need to have insight into individual students’ learning processes so that the lesson can be tailored to their learning needs and it is also desirable that students be given an opportunity to improve their speaking performance. The next step, according to the Bridging Model, is to design the principles aimed at achieving these goals to fit into the same lesson segments as are used in the regular lessons. Practical principles are formulated to slot these building blocks into the existing teaching practice in various ways so that the teachers can adapt their own teaching practice. Moreover, we have added an extra lesson component: a self-evaluation by the students. The design principles on which they are based are explained below.
Design principles to tailor lessons to students’ needs and teachers’ teaching practices
Design principle 1: Add a self-evaluation by the student to a speaking activity
A self-evaluation by the student is added to one or more speaking tasks in a lesson series. Students record a piece of speech, listen back to it, analyse it and write a plan for improvement. Self-evaluation was chosen because it serves both as a diagnostic tool for tailoring teaching (cf. contingent teaching, Van de Pol et al., 2011) and as a learning aid for the student (Lappin-Fortin & Rye, 2014; Poehner, 2012).
On the one hand, self-evaluations give teachers information about how and how well the students analyse their speaking performance, what they notice (Schmidt, 1990) and understand (Poehner, 2012) and how they want to improve. It is not necessary, therefore, that a student’s assessment is correct. It is the student’s subjective internal standard that the teacher is looking for in order to be able to tailor feedback and support. The aim in fact is to gain insight into how individual students assess themselves so that the teacher can align with their current level and degree of self-regulation (Sadler, 1998). This fits in with a sociocultural approach to learning with tailored support in what is known as the “zone of proximal development” (Vygotsky in e.g.: Lantolf & Poehner, 2011; Poehner, 2012).
On the other hand, self-evaluation can stimulate noticing (Lappin-Fortin & Rye, 2014) as well as self-regulation (Poehner, 2012) among students by allowing them to reflect on various aspects of their verbal language skills and the goals they are trying to reach. Moreover,
46
45